04 September 2014 2:20 PM

My new e-book, ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’, for which I could not find a three-dimensional publisher, now has 47 customer reviews at Amazon.co.uk ( 43 of them awarding it five stars). On Amazon.co.uk it has 11 reviews. ten of them 5-star.

If this is enough information for you , you should know that you do not need a Kindle or other e-reader to read this book. It can be downloaded in seconds on to any computer.

But if you’d like some examples of what you will find in this book, here are a few below:

DATELINE BAGHDAD (May 2003):

‘The Anglo-American attack on Iraq was supposed to be a liberation, and perhaps one day it will turn out to be one. But for most people here it has meant a return to Year Zero. Everything that made Iraq a country has gone. The currency swoops up and down in value and satchels full of dinars are needed to pay for anything important.

There is no law to speak of. The schools do not know what to teach or who should teach it. The frontiers are controlled by foreigners, if they are controlled at all. All the national TV channels have disappeared. The telephones are all dead.

Most medicines are unobtainable.

And in the world's second greatest oil producer, mile-long queues mark every petrol station - and the fuel on offer is a filthy, rancid-smelling muck which wrecks engines and fills the air with noxious clouds.

There is no gas for cooking, the tap water is tainted with sewage. Many people have not been paid for weeks and are not even sure that their jobs or businesses still exist or will ever reappear. Imagine what it must be like to be the parent of small children in such surroundings. Many Iraqis are haggard with worry and lack of sleep.

And yet in their guarded compounds, where the power always works and air conditioning cools the 95-degree heat, the American rulers of the city continue to show the clueless complacency that has marked their occupation since it began. The big men ride about in armoured convoys, machine-gunners fore and aft glaring suspiciously about them, too scared of the people they have liberated to get out, walk and see for themselves.

The real reason for the mess is that Washington knew nothing about Iraq - and cared even less - before it attacked.’…

…If the Americans had studied Britain's long-ago experience in Baghdad, they might have learned that democracy cannot simply be unpacked from crates and set up in a place like this. They might have learned that if you take over someone's country you have to use the old institutions and elites, even if you do not like them.'

DATELINE GAZA (October 2010):

‘Gaza was bombed on the day I arrived in retaliation for a series of rocket strikes on Israel, made by Arab militants. Those militants knew this would happen, but they launched their rockets anyway. Many Gazans hate them for this.

One, whom I shall call Ibrahim, told me how he had begged these maniacs to leave his neighbourhood during Israel's devastating military attack nearly two years ago. His wife was close to giving birth. He knew the Israelis would quickly seek out the launcher, and that these men would bring death down on his home. But the militants sneered at his pleading, so he shoved his wife into his car and fled. Moments after he passed the first major crossroads, a huge Israeli bomb burst on the spot where his car had been.

The diabolical power of modern munitions is still visible, in the ruins of what was once a government building. It looks as if a giant has chewed and smashed it, and then come back and stamped on it.

If you can imagine trying to protect a pregnant woman from such forces, then you can begin to understand how complex it is living here, where those who claim to defend you bring death to your door.

For the Islamist rocket-firers are also the government here, supported by Iran and others who care more for an abstract cause than they do for real people. They claim that their permanent war with Israel is for the benefit of the Palestinian Arabs. But is it?

Human beings will always strive for some sort of normal life. They do this even when bombs are falling and demagogues raging.

Even when, as in Gaza, there is no way out and morality patrols sweep through restaurants in search of illicit beer and women smoking in public or otherwise affronting the 14th Century values of Hamas.

So I won't give the name of the rather pleasant establishment where young women, Islamic butterflies mocking the fanatics' strict dress code with bright make-up and colourful silken hijabs, chattered as they inhaled apple-scented smoke from their water-pipes. Their menfolk, nearby, watched football on huge, flat-screen televisions. Nor will I say where I saw the Gazan young gathering for beach barbecues beneath palm-leaf umbrellas.

Of course this way of life isn't typical. But it exists, and it shows the 'prison camp' designation is a brain-dead over-simplification. If it is wrong for the rich to live next door to the desperate - and we often assume this when we criticise Israel - then what about Gaza's wealthy, and its Hamas rulers? They tolerate this gap, so they are presumably as blameworthy as the Israelis whose comfortable homes overlook chasms of poverty.

Then there is the use of the word 'siege'. Can anyone think of a siege in human history, from Syracuse to Leningrad, where the shops of the besieged city have been full of Snickers bars and Chinese motorbikes, and where European Union and other foreign aid projects pour streams of cash (often yours) into the pockets of thousands?’

DATELINE MOSCOW (February 2012):

This is where, 22 years ago, I came to live in a dark and secretive building where my neighbours were KGB men and the aristocrats of the old Kremlin elite. Here, in this mysterious and often dangerous place, I saw what lies just beneath our frail and fleeting civilisation - bones, blood, death, injustice, despair, horror, loss, corruption and fear. I grasped for the first time how wonderfully safe and lucky I had been all my life in the unique miracle of freedom and law that is - or was - England.

I learned to respect, above all, those who managed to retain some sort of integrity amid the knee-deep filth of communist Moscow. I also learned not to be too unkind to those who made compromises with it. I was there as a privileged person. Would I have been able to stay clean if I had lived as they did? Would you? I very much doubt it.

I saw the last hammers and sickles pulled down, and the braziers full of smouldering Communist Party membership cards the day the all-powerful Party died.

I saw the tanks trundle along my street as they tried to restore communism, and I saw them, and their cause, depart for ever. I witnessed oppressed peoples throw off Soviet rule. In the course of that struggle, I saw for the first time what a human head looks like after a bullet has passed through it, and also what a human face looks like when it is telling direct lies about murder.

When I finally left, I was sure that a horrible fog of lies and perversion had been scoured from the surface of the earth when communism ended. I am confident that it will not come back. From now on, it is just Russia - heartbroken, ravaged, afraid, desperate and cruel, but no longer a menace to us. Nor is Putin's frosty rule comparable to the gangster chaos of Boris Yeltsin - a drunken, debauched disaster that reduced millions of Russians to selling their personal possessions on the street to stay alive.

It is not just me saying this. The distinguished Russian film director Stanislav Govorukhin - whose devastating documentary We Can't Go On Living Like This helped end the communist era - is now working for Putin. He recalls that the Yeltsin era was 'a thieving outrage, open plunder. Billions were stolen, factories and whole industry sectors. They destroyed and stole, they ground Russia into dust'.

But, now, he says, 'we have returned to "normal", "civilised" corruption'.

This is, on the face of it, an astonishing thing to say. But most Russians readily understand it. Their country, almost always subject to absolute power, has been corrupt from its beginning. One of the greatest of pre-revolutionary Russian historians, Nikolai Karamzin, asked to sum up the character and story of his country and people, replied with just one word 'Voruyut' - 'They steal'.

But in the communist era, the state and the Party stole their private lives, their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers, and dragged them to death camps. And in the Yeltsin era, when Western 'experts' stalked the land, the nation's rulers stole the whole country.

I am not arguing in favour of this state of affairs, just pointing out that if the only alternative is even worse, you might see its advantages.

But I can see no reason at all why Britain should seek to undermine Russia's government.

DATELINE SHANGHAI:

‘They are building the future capital of the world here at the mouth of the Yangtze River, a city so vast, astonishing and potent that it ought to be a warning to the soft, declining West that the 21st Century may well see the centre of global power shift from the free, English-speaking world to the tyrannical Orient.

Those who have not seen this place simply cannot grasp the scale and nerve of the endeavour. Each day a new tower surges towards the sky in a project so gigantic it makes the Pharaohs look cautious. Forget the buried era of boilersuits and red books, tractor factories, grey pitted concrete cubes and windswept parade grounds. Chinese Communism is now just a vast machine of power, privilege and money, with the children of the mighty building great fortunes for themselves and their friends, untouchable and beyond criticism. 'To get rich is glorious' has replaced 'The East is Red' as the governing slogan of the times.

And it has been taken very seriously. The contrast between wealth and poverty here is like a Victorian morality tale. Except that in a China which has never known Christianity or the sentimentality of Charles Dickens, nobody draws any morals from it.

Filthy beggars grovel on the pavements near to where Porsches and Rolls-Royces sit in shiny showrooms. Luxury of every kind is on shameless display in the city's heart, while destitute migrant workers labour for tiny wages in construction gangs, living in spartan dormitories and sending their money home to mudbrick villages in the distant interior. While private living standards soar, the rivers are dark with muck and the smoggy, hazy air stinks of sulphur.

China is an entire alternative planet of 1.3 billion people with a shared culture and a more or less common language, in which the Third World and the First World are within a passport-free train ride of each other. And in Shanghai, only a bus ride often separates the two.

Travellers arriving at the colossal new international airport can head towards the city on a futuristic magnetic levitation train capable of more than 200mph, so fast they can barely make out the thousands struggling along the roads on decrepit bicycles.

Smart young people pour into the city's four huge B&Q warehouses to equip their fashionable new high-rise apartments to the highest standards. Superb restaurants charge London prices to smoothly dressed businessmen and their polished women amid glossy surroundings. Volkswagen and Buick cars, made in Shanghai factories, provide the growing middle class with a symbol of independence and status.

Yet overlooked by the new city of towers, respectable, decent people are still living in alleyways, known as longtangs, carting chamberpots to communal sluices, hanging washing from their windows, confined to one room where they must sleep on a shelf and sharing dismal kitchens with nine or ten neighbours.

Young married couples are often forced to share the same bedroom as their parents, separated only by a curtain. These people are so poor that they sometimes fight with each other over who has been using too much expensive water, so that each family has its own metered tap. I saw one such place with a dozen taps projecting from a riot of plumbing over the grim tiled sink. At night the kitchen is almost unusable because it is full of bicycles which cannot safely be left outside.

You might think that such people would be glad to be rehoused. But often their homes are bulldozed by unscrupulous developers and they are simply driven away without compensation. They are unlikely to find flats in the new blocks which swiftly replace their demolished alleyways.

Their plight is barely noticed. China, which has just put a man in space and plans to follow America to the Moon, is using the same driven determination to build a great megalopolis which is plainly designed to rival New York and utterly overshadow Hong Kong - whose colonial past and lingering traces of Britishness make it distasteful to the fervent, unashamed patriots who now hold power in Peking.

The sheer size of it is almost impossible to take in - the official city limits cover 2,500 square miles containing more than 13 million people, not far short of the entire population of Australia and bigger than several European countries. The packed central core of 90 square miles somehow crams in nearly eight million humans, perhaps the highest population density in the world. That would be even bigger if ruthless pressure to keep families small did not lead to 300,000 abortions a year, twice the figure for the whole of the UK.

There is plenty of ruthlessness here. You can practically feel it. Ruthlessness has drawn in nearly 20,000 foreign companies glad to make use of the low pay and high skills available in this disciplined police state with its almost limitless supply of labour and its excellent education system. Ruthlessness has created Pudong, until recently a glum district of low-rent housing and rice paddies, now planned as Asia's Wall Street.

As yet it is an eerie, inhuman city within a city of extravagant, ornate towers obviously meant to copy and eventually surpass the skylines of Manhattan and Chicago. Two of them, the Oriental Pearl TV tower, with its globes and spire, and the Jin Mao Tower with its strange pagodalike spikes, top 1,400ft. The tallest skyscraper in the world will soon stand alongside them. At their feet sits a great stone engraved with the words of Deng Xiaoping: 'Waste no time. Do not waver until the development of Pudong is complete.' If you are surprised that a communist leader demanded the swift construction of a boastful zone dedicated to rampant greed, then it is time that you realised that the world's Marxists now believe that capitalism, not state socialism, will create the classless, global, multicultural world they have always dreamed of.

These arrogant towers stare down - and it cannot be an accident - on the ghostly grandeur of the Bund, the old Shanghai riverfront which was once the symbol of Western Imperial power in Asia. But its formerly majestic Edwardian and Twenties buildings, which long ago symbolised the fact that the West's foot was on China's neck, are now grimy, sad, dingy and pathetically small, preserved as a museum of a time which Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to remember with bitterness.

Here is the riverside park where, until 1928, a notice at the gates banned Chinese people from setting foot and casually added that dogs, too, were not admitted. Here are the old British and French concessions where Chinese law did not run and Westerners controlled their own special quarters of the city. And here is the place where a brief, savage and unequal artillery duel between a Japanese cruiser and a brave but tiny British gunboat in December 1941 signalled the doom of European colonial power in China.

You cannot help feeling that we in the West are being sent a message here. The whole project seems to say: 'You came here and taught us that if you are poor and weak, then the rich and strong can rule learning Chinese over you. Now it is our turn to be rich and strong.' For a moment, the image flickers through my mind of Chinese street signs in London and parts of our cities given over to Chinese law while we are kept outside.’

DATELINE GORLOVKA, EASTERN UKRAINE (September 2010)

'It is true that there are plenty of parts of Ukraine where people do feel and speak Ukrainian - mainly in the west around the city now called Lviv (though in the past 150 years it has also been the Austrian city of Lemberg, the Polish city of Lwow and the Soviet city of Lvov - in this part of the world you can move from country to country just by staying in the same place).

But travel east, as I did, to the old coal-mining region of the Don Basin, and you will find out why so many Ukrainian citizens did not support the 2004 Orange Revolution. I went to the decayed town of Gorlovka. Independence has done little for this place. Cut off from its Russian hinterland and its markets, it is expiring. All around are dead slag heaps and ruined mines and factories, and tragic landscapes of collapse under a ferocious sun.

Gorlovka’s coal mines and chemical works fed the USSR's industries. Now they are mostly dead and the town - twinned with Barnsley in the Eighties - is nearly as bereft of its traditional industries as its Yorkshire opposite number. Sad, empty playgrounds are melancholy evidence of a city condemned to die. There is still a statue of Lenin in the main square but on its flanks are scrawled graffiti - a thing I have never seen before in the former USSR. The image of Lenin was once revered, and later hated, but never trivialised by drawings of Bart Simpson.

The mayor, Ivan Sakharchuk, is proud of his treaty with Barnsley and also insists that there are no difficulties with being Ukrainian.

I am not so sure. Nobody uses the town's Ukrainian name of Horlivka. Many of the street signs are still in Russian. The names of shops are in Russian. The newspapers on sale are in Russian. In the rather smart Cafe Barnsley, the only beer on sale is Russian and the radio is tuned to a Russian station. I suspect the people are hoping for - and expecting - a Russian future.’

DATELINE HAVANA (July 2006)

'Castro was to revolution what Mick Jagger was to rock, and his image (and Guevara's) had a lot to do with the strange student revolt that destroyed Charles de Gaulle's conservative France in 1968, and with the wave of cultural revolution that changed the morals and attitudes of the Western world and has now subsided into the weary swamps of political correctness.

Interestingly, the student revolutionaries who loved Castro and Guevara got Fidel wholly wrong. He loathed rock music as degenerate and only in recent years has he recognised it as an ally, permitting a John Lennon memorial park in Havana. They got a lot of other things about him wrong, too.

Castro matters so much to the fashionable liberal Left that they have tried to deny – to themselves – the true nature of his very nasty regime. A recent example of this was a March 2005 letter to The Guardian signed by, among others, Harold Pinter, Tariq Ali, Nadine Gordimer,Harry Belafonte and Danielle Mitterrand, which claimed that in Cuba 'there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959, and where despite the economic blockade, there are levels of health, education and culture that are internationally recognised'.

This is almost total garbage and just shows what the Left will put up with when it likes someone. Castro personally reversed the verdict of an important trial when he disagreed with it. He used to round up homosexuals and put them in labour camps to 'make men of them'.

One of his old comrades, Huber Matos, confided after 20 years of brutality and starvation in Castro's jails that he was 'subjected to all kinds of horrors, including the puncturing of my genitals'.

Just three years ago, after a brief period of liberalisation, Castro threw 75 peaceful dissidents into dungeons.

Most are still there. Their wives demonstrate bravely every Sunday for their release and are attacked and abused by 'spontaneous' mobs of loyalist women.

Others who defy the leader face similar misery short of jail. They lose their jobs. Their houses are trashed by government supporters. One incredibly brave dissenter, Oswaldo Paya, remains at liberty (NOTE: Oswaldo Paya has since died in a mysterious car crash) but he is constantly watched and the state has placed an insulting poster near his house which says: 'In a country under siege, all dissent is treason.' Imagine the response of Pinter and his friends if a Right wing Latin American dictator had done half these things. No wonder one of the Alsatian guard dogs that patrol Castro's villa near Havana is called Guardian.

Or so I am told. Like all tyrants, Castro conducts his real life behind thick screens. After a long absence he has twice appeared in public recently.

During a rambling speech in Cordoba, Argentina, he continually plucked at his collar as if in some sort of discomfort.

The cameras swung away. Back in Cuba a few days later, he jokingly promised not to stay in power until he was 100.

A recent rumour that he had died was spread, as always, by Cuban exiles who yearn for him to go so that they can come back.’

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07 July 2014 4:07 PM

Experience post-invasion Baghdad at dusk as the power fails yet again. Travel to Iraq’s Shia shrines and witness the uncovering of a mass grave of Saddam Hussein's victims. Try to visit a bar and a bowling-alley in Pyongyang (and fail). Travel on the Mandalay-Rangoon express through the secret city of Naypyidaw. Run from the wild dogs on the prairies of what used to be Detroit. Penetrate to the heart of a Shia shrine in Iran, and meet a Mullah in the Holy City of Qom. Find out what it’s really like to be an both an Arab and an Israeli. Meet the state’s thugs in Cairo. Find out why the people of Sevastopol didn’t like being Ukrainian, and visit a town in Ukraine (now in turmoil) that’s twinned with Barnsley . Visit Spain’s Gibraltar, a rocky colony on the edge of Africa. Experience the power of Shanghai, meet a Chinese caveman and cough and splutter in China’s most polluted city. Enter the shanty towns of Caracas, and visit the spot in Havana where Che Guevara supervised mass executions of Castro’s opponents. Meet the students at India’s strangest university. Mourn as TV is introduced to beautiful, serene Bhutan. Enter the sinister mining zones of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

All this, and much more, is to be found in 'Short Breaks in Mordor', my new e-book, not available as a conventional book because conventional publishers didn’t think it was interesting enough. Prove them wrong.

09 March 2013 4:50 PM

The death of Hugo Chavez prompts me to reproduce this article, my report from Caracas , which was first published in the Mail on Sunday in April 2008.

OUT OF the grave we thought we’d shovelled it into all those years ago, revolutionary Marxism comes climbing once again. Most of us were pleased to see it go, but not all of us.

No wonder the world’s incurably fashionable Leftists, who hate their own countries, love Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. They have been homeless since the USSR fizzled away in a cloud of rust, and even more bereft since a trembling Fidel Castro laid down his combat fatigues and went off into the twilight in his pyjamas.

Comrade Chavez has given them back a fatherland, and provided them with a hero – a strangely lovable, smiling one, with a sense of humour and a good line in teasing mockery of the United States. He also has some of the biggest oil reserves in the world.

Castro, of course, never had any oil. But Venezuela is overflowing with it, which changes everything. In this increasingly sinister country, oil money sustains a more or less unhinged regime that mixes the methods of Stalin and the presentational skills of Richard and Judy to impose socialism on the Caribbean’s southern shores.

It also makes global mischief, flirting with Iran and the rest of the outcast and stroppy nations of the world. Does it matter? Yes. Venezuela is now an important global focus for trouble; a rallying point for the enemies of Western society and lawful democracy, a new source of hope for every silly idealist, from London’s Ken Livingstone upwards.

And it is a menace to the wobbling economies of the world. Chavez has been busily nagging Opec to keep up the world price of oil, while cunningly keeping down the cost at home to buy votes. Oil may fetch more than $100 a barrel on the world markets, but Venezuelans can fill their cars for just 75 pence .

Still, economic bungling of the standard Marxist kind can create bankruptcy and rationing out of the greatest abundance. What ought to be one of the most prosperous societies on earth is suffering grave shortages of the most basic things. This week in Caracas I have seen many queues for milk, which even the rich cannot get. If a delivery arrives at a supermarket it is gone in half an hour. Last week there was no lavatory paper. Before that, it was rice and meat you couldn’t get.

Inflation is terrible, and power cuts are increasingly common.

Amid this mess, the nation’s would-be despot rules largely through a curious weekly TV talk show – Hallo, President! – in which he harangues his people, argues with his audience, publicly humiliates and lectures his terrified ministers, invents policies, prophesies grandiose schemes which will never happen and occasionally breaks into song. Comrade Chavez fancies himself as a singer, a baseball player and a comedian.

As he himself says: ‘It’s a religious programme – because God only knows when it will end.’ Which is true enough. Dignitaries invited to join the studio audience take cushions, sandwiches and bottles of water to help them endure the hours of raging, reminiscence and chatter.

El Presidente’s unending rants have become a national joke. At a recent summit in Chile, King Juan Carlos of Spain snapped at Chavez: ‘Why don’t you shut up?’ Millions of Venezuelans downloaded the rebuke and use it as the ring-tone on their mobiles.

Sleepless and obsessive, Chavez pursues his revolutionary ends into the small hours, ringing his cabinet with his latest ideas, commandeering TV stations, descending on remote townships and ordering local officials to complete 17 impossible targets before breakfast.

They just hope he won’t come back and check, for his wrath can be terrible.

This might appear to be a fun revolution: student politics on a big budget. It must be the only country where the graffiti is done by the government, with the police standing guard over artists as they spray pro-Chavez murals. Activists are everywhere in their scarlet, slogan-covered T-shirts. In the squares of Caracas, little stalls called ‘Hot Corners’ blare out revolutionary speeches and hand out propaganda – which probably helps make up for the lavatory-paper shortage.

But it is not half so funny if you look closely. And it is not funny at all if you dare to stand up to Chavez. For this brilliant, impulsive and charming former parachute officer is also a ruthless seeker of power and true believer in revolution. And he does not really care how he gets control, or how he holds on to it.

He may go on about democracy, but he would have been perfectly happy to attain office with gunfire and tanks. His first attempt at the presidency was in 1992, when he tried a military coup. It was a clownish failure; the sort of putsch where people fail to turn up on time, get lost and cannot find the keys to vital buildings.

So much for Lieutenant Colonel Chavez’s military skills. But amazingly, before they took him away to prison, the authorities put him on TV so he could order his followers to lay down their arms. He did so, but added two crucial words: ‘Por ahora’ (For now).

Like Schwarzenegger’s ‘I’ll be back’ in The Terminator, this has become his catchphrase – it thrills supporters and frightens opponents.

From that day, his popularity grew. And it is easy to see why. Like almost every oil state, Venezuela has fouled up its inheritance. Needless poverty besieges Caracas in the form of squalid, chaotic, violent shanty towns that are so dangerous the police won’t go there at weekends. In this country of 28million people, there are 1,000 murders a month and guns are everywhere.

Yet these shameful slums lie within sight of the modern towers of the city. Chavez realised there were millions of votes in these suppurating places, so he scattered his oil bounty among them. Cuban medical workers have set up clinics in the slums. Smart new schools are being built there. Hundreds of thousands receive state handouts direct from Chavez, who has seized the state oil company and uses it as a private bank to reward supporters.

These supporters know which side their votes are buttered: pro-Chavez posters decorate their wretched homes. Standing outside his sister’s tiny three-room house – or shed – in the San Agustin shanty district, Juan, a security guard working for a state project, told me: ‘In all my 53 years Hugo Chavez is the best leader this country has ever had. Before him, this neighbourhood was abandoned. Now we have such good health care that doctors come to our homes on house calls.’ He adds quickly: ‘This is thanks to our Cuban brothers.’

Now I am sure some of what Juan said was intended for the suspicious-looking character who hung around nearby as we talked, ears flapping, plainly spying for the state.

But some of it was true. The San Agustin slum has been festering on its humid hillside for 70 years, and this is the first time anyone has done anything about it. That is why Venezuela’s ‘democratic’ non-socialist political parties are discredited and widely hated.

Chavez has proved that neglect of the poor is not inevitable, he speaks and thinks like them and has used the oil billions to build up an army of followers who will vote for him.

Nobody can claim Venezuela was ever a well-run, fair country. But it does have quite a strong civil society, independent of the state in a way Marxists cannot stand. Press and TV are free. The universities teach without state interference. The government more or less abides by the constitution. Private property is as safe as steel bars, guards and barricades at the ends of wealthy streets can make it.

Yet there is now a dark threat: last year Chavez moved beyond social reform and began to show his very sharp teeth. He began by shutting down the country’s oldest TV station, RCTV, because its criticisms had annoyed him. That’s when he encountered dangerous resistance for the first time.

It came from people he could not dismiss as plutocrats or supporters of the old regime. His opponents were middle-class students. One of their leaders was Geraldine Alvarez, a 22-year-old who does not look or sound like a would-be politician, but as if she would rather be out at a party. And that is what makes her so dangerous to Chavez. She is not a professional politician, she serves no vested interest and she is immune to all his nasty Bolshevik tactics.

When Chavez said he would close RCTV, she and some friends began a protest. The official TV station censored them. The police attacked their peaceful protests with tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets.

Geraldine said: ‘When we went to the National Assembly and asked for the right of reply, they said we were terrorists and trained by the CIA. They said on state TV that I was mentally ill. But most people did not buy these lies. Poor people in this country view students with sympathy. They could see the placards we carried were home-made, not mass-produced like those of the government.’

Nor did people believe it when Chavez sneered that the students were ‘spoiled rich brats’, since most came from modest middle-class or working-class homes.

WHEN censorship and smears failed, the regime re-sorted to the bully tactics familiar in Eastern European countries as they were dragged into communism in the Forties. Supposedly spontaneous ‘counter-demonstrators’ appeared, hurling stones and bottles at the students – from behind police lines.

Chavez supporters, firing guns, raged through the campus of the main Caracas university. The bullet holes can still be seen in buildings.

‘It was so dangerous at one time that we had to wear bulletproof vests,’ Geraldine recalls. But they never fell into Chavez’s trap, refusing to attack the President personally and ignoring calls from the opposition leaders: ‘We said, “We are students, not politicians.”’

By this time, Chavez had taken his next step: a planned new constitution that would have abolished the 12-year limit on his term of office, and which many believed would threaten private property.

Geraldine said: ‘We stopped people in the streets and on the buses and urged them to read these proposals. We wanted to wake the people up.’

Their courage and determination paid off. Chavez began to lose powerful support among his own oldest friends. General Raul Isaias Baduel, 52, had been a comrade from their early days in the army together, but he resigned as defence minister in protest at the planned constitutional changes. He is now trying to build a new opposition.

The desk in Baduel’s office – untypically for a paratroop commander – is covered in books on politics and philosophy.

The table behind it is crowded with Roman Catholic religious images curiously mingled with a Koran and an Israeli army camouflage skullcap. He and Chavez are no longer friends. ‘I feel he has cancelled our friendship,’ he says. Typically, Chavez was charming at first but later Baduel’s bodyguards were abruptly withdrawn and Chavez supporters began to smear him. Baduel’s actions, while commanding a paratroop unit based near the capital, saved Chavez from a Right-wing coup attempt in 2002. Yet, in 2007, Baduel accused his old friend of planning what was in effect a coup against the constitution. He says on both occasions he was acting according to the same principle.

Chavez’s admirers would also find it hard to dismiss Ismael Garcia, leader of the socialist Podemos party (the name means ‘we can’). Garcia shows me a picture of himself at a rally a few years ago, sitting smiling two seats away from his one-time comrade, Chavez. But he, too, has now split with him, refusing to merge his group into the single party Chavez wants, once again using Stalinist tactics from 60 years and 4,000 miles away.

Garcia says Chavez’s constitutional reforms would have threatened private property had they gone ahead: ‘He proposed the state model that failed in the Soviet Union, in which the state controls everything.’

Together, the student movement, the shortages and the defections of his old allies led to Chavez being narrowly beaten in a referendum on his constitutional changes. Many feared he would ignore the result and go ahead anyway, others suspected he would rig the vote, but with surprising wisdom and patience, he did neither. It is rumoured his old friend Castro called him from his sick-bed to tell him to bow to the verdict and play a long game. So he waits.

He continues to use oil money to buy the backing of the poor and – it is widely believed – arm them against the remote danger of another army coup.

He plans a slow revenge on the students: he is demanding that universities drop their entrance exams so he can pack them with his young, half-educated supporters.

Oil prices continue to climb, so Chavez will be able to buy off most trouble for the foreseeable future. And then?

To reassure supporters and intimidate critics, huge red placards have been placed on high points in the city, bearing those two words ‘Por ahora’ with which he once before promised to be back.

As the United States weakens and China grows in power, as the victories of the Cold War are frittered away and Russia slides back towards its ancient autocracy, what happened to all those brave hopes that free societies were here to stay and the mad experiments of the 20th Century would never be repeated?

Here we go again, red flags flapping, off to the same old disaster – and fashionable Leftists in the West are applauding, as usual.

I much enjoyed meeting Decca Aitkenhead, and will post some thoughts about the encounter here later this week.

A couple of points from the weekend. Now that it is plain that the Castro tyranny was and is an indefensible political slum, I am now asked if I am ,by attacking it, defending the Batista government which preceded it. Obviously not. Why should I? One thing is fairly plain from that era, which is that Batista was nearing the end of his time in power, and was likely to be displaced anyway. Though I would ask any fair-minded person to compare the conditions of Fidel Castro’s imprisonment, after his armed revolt against Batista at the Moncada barracks, and Castro’s treatment of those who did no more than speak critically of him. I’d also mention that Cuba before Castro was a relatively advanced economy, and that many of the claims of the Castro revolution, notably to have made huge improvements in medical care, are not what they are cracked up to be. Medical care and education in Castro’s Cuba are by no means as great as the propaganda claim, and the Communist elite have privileged access to both schooling and medical care, which would surely be needless if things were as good as we are told.

No more do I defend the Tsarist autocracy which ruled Russia before the Bolshevik revolution.

The logic of such questions is that the revolution which they support or defend was the only possible resolution of the problems of the country. I do not think that this was, or generally is, the case. If Russia had had only the February Revolution of 1917, and not the October putsch, it would have been saved from a long nightmare. If Castro had been what the USA believed he was when he was in the Sierras, a democratic rebel, then Cuba might likewise have been saved from much.

I am reasonably chided for disparaging the accuracy of DNA in one post, and saying that DNA evidence is a useful safeguard(though not the only one, nor a wholly reliable one) agianst wrongful conviction in murder trials. I don't think this is inconsistent. DNA seems to me to be more useul in acquitting than it is in convicting. That's why its existence is so reassuring, and another reason why a general DNA register is objectionable. Let it be taken when an accusation is made - that's in our tradition. And destroyed if there is no conviction. That too is our tradition.

But in any case, like all evidence, it cannot be separated from vital traditional protections such as the presumption of innocence, jury trial (with unanimous verdicts) and a free press.

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19 October 2012 5:11 PM

First of all, I was amazed to be challenged by a contributor who doubted my description of Fidel Castro as a ‘torturer’ . Let’s get this over with quickly. Castro is mainly a murderer, his regime having put to death, after appalling summary trials (in some of which ‘not guilty’ verdicts were actually reversed on the spot with the aid of the mob) or no trials at all, scores of opponents in its early years. The revolting Ernesto Guevara was much-involved in that bloodstained era. Visitors to Havana can still see the bullet scars in the walls of the great prison fortress above the city, where the murders were carried out while Guevara lounged on the walls smoking cigars.

And the recent death of the noble and peaceful dissenter Oswaldo Paya in a peculiar road accident seems to me to be a bit suspicious. Castro (or ‘Fidel’ as the Left matily insist on calling him) has also been known to lock people up in ‘drawer’ cells, a form of torture in itself which I will not describe here. Look it up.

But the single best-documented instance of torture under Castro is that inflicted on Castro’s former comrade Huber Matos, who sought to resign from that regime in protest at Communist influence. He was imprisoned for ‘treason and sedition’ for 20 years in 1959. No remission for him. As he recounted, after his release into exile in 1979 ‘prison was a long agony from which I emerged alive because of God's will. I had to go on hunger strikes, mount other types of protests. Terrible. On and off, I spent a total of sixteen years in solitary confinement, constantly being told that I was never going to get out alive, that I had been sentenced to die in prison. They were very cruel, to the fullest extent of the word... I was tortured on several occasions, I was subjected to all kinds of horrors, all kinds, including the puncturing of my genitals. Once during a hunger strike a prison guard tried to crush my stomach with his boot... Terrible things.’

Enough? I’m amazed at the free pass that Castro still gets from so many people. Anyone wanting more should look up the treatment given to the poet Armando Valladares, by the funky Cuban maximum leader. .

Now, on to Munich and the book by John Charmley, ‘Neville Chamberlain and the Lost Peace’. I think several things emerge from this.

One of the most interesting is that in 1936, Duff Cooper , then a junior war minister, urged that Britain should create a continental-sized army. His idea was over-ruled. At least in this matter Cooper was consistent. The policy which he and the anti-appeasers later followed would have made sense had Britain possessed a large conscript army by 1938. Such an army (though there would always have been a difficulty in getting it on to the continent) was essential if any country wanted to play a serious part in the power politics of the European landmass.

The national government , much influenced by Chamberlain’s own tight management of limited funds, chose otherwise. From the beginning of rearmament in 1934, up till the arrival of war in 1939, Chamberlain strongly favoured the Air Force, and to a lesser extent the Navy. There simply wasn’t enough money for all three. I should add, though Charmley doesn’t go into this, that the Labour Party largely opposed rearmament during this period, claiming to believe that such weapons would be used against the USSR, though it is hard to see how, why or where that might then have happened.

Most British strategists relied completely on the huge and supposedly excellent French Army (in fact a shell, rotten, ill-equipped and badly led, and over-committed to the fatally incomplete Maginot line, which ran out exactly where it was most needed, thanks to the sudden decision of Belgium to become neutral. The theory ran that the French Army stood as an immovable barrier to German attack, and would certainly hold Germany off for long enough for Britain to create a wartime army if needed. Britain didn’t introduce military conscription till Spring 1939, a move once again opposed by Labour.

Britain, meanwhile, had its own complete and functioning Maginot Line, known as the English Channel, a defence which proved crucial in the war, and which worked perfectly in deterring attempts to invade our territory.

Chamberlain and his allies chose this course because they saw the main purpose of armed forces as being to protect us from attack, and to defend the Empire in any global conflict.

They didn’t envisage a continental war, and they didn’t want one. And they were doubtful about the old Eyre Crowe theory (very influential in 1914, to disastrous effect) of the ‘Balance of Power’ . This idea, often treated by contributors here as a fact, or a gospel, was and remains a theory, that Britain needed a balance of power on the Continent to be secure in herself. Is this true? I am not sure.

Certainly, our efforts to maintain such a balance in 1939 ended up by creating first one wholly unbalanced Europe under Hitler, and then another almost as unbalanced one in which the USSR was only kept in check by US intervention, and we had to hand over our balancing instruments to Washington.

Now we have the German domination which poor dear ‘Bert’ is unable to perceive, because there isn’t a big sign on top of the Berlaymont Building in Brussels saying ‘German Empire’. Well, so there isn’t. But if he looks at the history of the Bismarckian Empire, which was less tactful about its existence, he’ll see that it too was constructed through customs and currency union, by centralisation and standardisation (including standardisation of time, NB) and by regulation.

Back to Mr Charmley. I’m pleased to see that he punctures the absurd myth of Anthony Eden, that terribly over-rated man, who is always given a free pass by standard histories, as if he was in the forefront of the anti-appeasement battle. He wasn’t, and was much more concerned about Mussolini than about Hitler . I’m of the opinion that if we had not been scared out of the Hoare-Laval Pact, we might have kept Mussolini from getting too close to Hitler, and so changed the course of events quite a lot. The Anschluss with Austria might have been much delayed. We might not have need to fight for the Mediterranean. But Eden had a sort of ‘principled’ objection to dealing with such a nasty man.

Like all those who were terribly principled in the 1930s, notably Winston Churchill, he ended up appeasing Stalin instead. And not just appeasing him but being ordered about and humiliated by him.

What Charmley skates over a bit (and which few people discussing the era ever bother to record) is the curious episode of May 1938, when Czechoslovakia claimed that Germany was about to invade her. Then, when no invasion happened, the Czechoslovak President Eduard Benes boasted to the world that he had forced Hitler to back down. Pat Buchanan, in his fascinating ‘Churchill, Hitler and the unnecessary War’ argues, that Hitler was so enraged by this very public humiliation that he then and there resolved to destroy the Czechoslovak state.

Charmley refers to this event, but nothing like as much as Buchanan does. He does, however, make Chamberlain’s behaviour seem a good deal more rational than most historians do, and produces documents to back this up. What was Britain’s interest in preserving the artificial and increasingly unstable Czechoslovak state. Was France willing to fight for Prague? No. When Daladier and Bonnet came to London, they were very shifty indeed about what they would do. It was a relic of a French foreign policy dreamed up in more spacious days. Was Moscow willing to fight for Prague? Unlikely. The red Army had just been purged, and the USSR was so hated by Poland and the other East European states that they would never grant the Red Army the right of passage.

It’s hard to see what Britain could have done. We had nothing much to fight with, the French were shaky, by the time we’d acted, the Germans would have seized the Czech lands anyway, much as happened after we ‘defended’ and ‘went to war for‘ Poland a year later.

It would just have been 1939 a year earlier, probably with a neutral USSR. Who knows how it would have ended up, but I can’t see how we could have acquitted ourselves particularly well. The anti-appeasers, on the other hand , all manage to look very noble. But in Cabinet discussions, they didn’t really have much to offer by way of an alternative. We had armed forces suitable for a defensive war, or for retaliation against air attacks (or so we thought – the bombing planes and tactics turned out to be hopeless when the time came, though the fighters, luckily, were much better) and for holding on to the Empire – but not for a war in Europe. Even then, the navy was stretched far beyond its ability, quite unable to defend our Far Eastern possessions and the home islands at the same time.

As far as I can make out ( and I’m still roaming through specialist volumes on the Polish guarantee) it was Lord Halifax, Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, who became emotional and sentimental about national pride and standing up to dictators, and who drove the guarantee forward after Hitler’s seizure of Prague.

But whichever way you look at it, whoever’s account you read, it is impossible to doubt that the Polish guarantee either emboldened Poland into refusing to make concessions on Danzig, or convinced Hitler that war with Poland, rather than negotiation, was the only way to get what he wanted (and that by implication, a partition of Poland with Stalin would be a neat solution). In my view it did both, so hastening the war and ensuring that we would be dragged into it at the worst possible moment. By the way, it also seems pretty clear that the British talks with the USSR were doomed from the start, as we weren’t prepared to let Stalin have the Baltic states. No appeasement, there then. I wonder, if we had been ready to do so, whether he would have preferred our offer to Ribbentrop’s.

Even worse, we were lashed to France, which wasn’t remotely ready to face the revived German army, despite the clear warnings of German tactics provided by the Polish war. The September 1939 declaration of war still looks like a bad mess to me, and one we need to confront, whereas Roosevelt’s restraint and delay appears sensible and well-considered.

Yet to this day we laugh at and scorn Chamberlain and his umbrella, and refuse to see that he might have been wiser than we thought. As I have said before, once the floor gives way beneath you, it goes on giving way, again and again until you finally reach the bottom, a disconsolate and bruised bundle covered in splinters and plaster dust, compelled to think thoughts you hate. How much easier it is to refuse to think, and fall back on the Finest Hour or even ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’.

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29 September 2012 5:27 PM

I’ve always liked the expression ‘Resurrection Man’, used in late 18th-century England to describe the unscrupulous gents who dug up freshly-buried corpses for surgeons in need of subjects for dissection. It has a lovely English robustness and grim humour to it. Does anyone else view the world in quite the same way? And Jerry Cruncher, the bank messenger who supplements his income with a bit of resurrection work (in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’), is one of my favourite minor Dickens characters, another being the redoubtable Miss Pross, so wonderfully unlike her French opposite number, Madame Defarge.

But there’s really not much excuse for trying to dig up old Karl Marx, who was been weighed down with an enormous and hideous monument to himself in Highgate Cemetery, for 60-odd years (before then, the old man’s grave was much less prominently marked). He was an accomplished journalist and an energetic and interesting thinker, but he was profoundly wrong about economics, and his ideas, alas, became the gospel of a very ugly and gangsterish political movement, which blasted the lives and fortunes of millions of people for 70 miserable years, and whose ugly relics and vast graveyards still litter the planet. So why on earth will the BBC give an hour to his memory on BBC-2 on Monday 1st October? I am interested in this project because I am very slightly involved in it. I was contacted several months ago and asked if I would be interviewed about Marx, as an ex-Trotskyist. Given that the BBC is crawling with left-wingers of various sorts, I assumed this was because they felt the need to have a hostile voice. They did, but the trouble was that there isn’t all that much to say.

Marx’s fundamental error was to assume that there was such a thing as ‘capitalism’, that is to say that normal economic relations were a specific state of being, out of which humanity could escape by adopting a rather vague alternative known as ‘socialism’. I always object, these days, to the very idea of ‘capitalism’. It treats remorseless reality as a dogmatic choice. You might as well call weather ‘ rainism and sunism’, as if we had some way of creating and dwelling in an alternative atmosphere which dispensed with the earth’s climate as it is, and instead provided perpetual delight, warmth, fertility, plenty and joy (details unspecified, to be supplied after you’ve handed over state power to me). But not so the BBC. They chose to rank Old Karl alongside Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek, as a towering economist of our age. He is to be number three in a series of three ‘masters of Money’ on BBC2 at 9.00 on Monday evening. I’m not myself sure that Hayek ranks with Keynes in influence or importance, though he is certainly interesting and original. I tend to think that he (like Keynes, only more so ) has been done in by his disciples, who have made more out of his ideas than Hayek would ever have wished to do.

The same thing happened to Keynesianism under, for example, Macmillan, who went far beyond what the great man himself would have sanctioned. Even the most rigorous economic conservatives have to concede that Keynes engaged practically in the real world, and was often right in his actions because his understanding was so great. But he never pretended, as the Marxists do, to a total understanding of reality. Nor, I think, did Hayek. The trouble with economies is that they are wherever they are when you need to fix them, and are seldom if ever easy to subject to formulae or idealistic solutions. Take our own, just now. A conservative person can do little, because the British economy is so dependent on welfare payments and high taxation that a sudden withdrawal of these things would probably kill it, just as a starving man can be killed by being given what would normally be a healthy square meal. A moral and cultural revolution must precede an economic one. Economics, as Keynes and Hayek( and Marx) knew well is subject to politics, morality, human desire and self-discipline (or the lack of it) habit and tradition. Not to mention the existence or non-existence of the rule of law, the thing which I tend to feel is vital to any truly successful state, and which is itself founded on Christian principles.

But anyway, I found myself sitting on an old chair in a bizarre, almost derelict house in West London which had recently been used as the set for ‘the King’s Speech’, being interviewed on film (though not by Miss Flanders, whose involvement I knew nothing of) about Karl Marx. The result can be seen on Monday evening, two very brief cameo appearances, in which I laugh at the idea of an ‘alternative’ to ‘capitalism’, and in which I quote from my book , ‘The Rage Against God’ that ‘Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood, and you never get there’. Well, better than nothing, but what I had hoped to get across was that intelligent modern revolutionaries see that Marx was in fact a prophet of globalism and of the cultural and moral destruction which is engendered by the race for wealth. That’s why they backed the invasion of Iraq and the new multiculti, liberal interventionist, Hillary Clintonised USA. And it’s why conservatives like me dig in our heels about closing borders and defending national sovereignty and monoculture. In the words of the old bearded one : ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. ‘The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.’

And then again :’ The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.

'It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.’

Spooky, eh, when you think that it was published in 1848? Marx turns out not to have been the prophet of Lenin and Stalin, who hated God, wanted absolute power and needed a pretext for seizing it, but to have been the prophet of the Canton sweatshop, the computer age and the sweeping away of national borders. That is a really interesting subject, and so is the Gramscian cultural and moral revolution which has helped to make it possible, and which has accompanied it. Alas, Miss Flanders’s programme (which is crammed with silly parables and games to explain matters to simple minds, and rapid editing, to help any gnats who may be watching cope with their short attention spans. TV for gnats is increasingly common, I find) is much more about whether Marx has anything to say about the current banking crisis. In my view, the answer to that is a resounding ‘Nope’. There’s also a silly failed joke about how a ‘Marxist Broadcasting Corporation’ would have reported the events of the last few years, which looks to me remarkably like what the BBC has actually been doing. See for yourselves on Monday evening.

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01 September 2011 2:53 PM

In one of his latest comments, Mr Charles writes : ‘PH entirely misses my point. I was not arguing for the rights or wrongs of Grammar Schools. I was asking him to tell us how he would sell their reintroduction to the voting public.’

But I dealt precisely, in detail and at length with that issue. I only mentioned the possibility that he really didn’t grasp that grammar schools were better, in case this was his problem.

I do sometimes wonder if people such as Mr Charles make any serious effort to read what I write here. For likewise Mr Charles says : ‘ If PH really believes that those of us on the left believe we have had things “our way” for so long, he is monstrously deluded. Every Labour government since Attlee has betrayed its founding principles.’

But I didn’t say the left *believed* it has had things all its own way. I said (emphasis added by me) : ‘They *have* had things their way for many years now.’

The Left’s strange ability to believe that it is still an outsider rebel faction, far from power, long after it has taken over the establishment, is one of the principal features of the argument I have been making ever since I published ‘The Abolition of Britain’ (and ever since my critics started not reading it, while thinking that they had) in 1999.

I recall particularly making fun of the fact that the horrible Fidel Castro regime in Cuba, one of the most repressive state apparatuses on earth, has an official radio station called ‘Radio Rebelde’ (Rebel Radio) . This seems to me to be a good metaphor for the Left’s difficulty in taking responsibility for, and taking satisfaction from, its accession to power. A few years ago the editor of the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme paid me the great compliment of delaying the 8.30 news Bulletin, so that I could continue my debate with Lindsey German, of the ‘Socialist Workers’ Party’, in which I tried (yet failed) to explain to Ms German that she and her comrades had much to be pleased about in modern Britain.

The fact that the Secretary of State for Defence (himself a not-very-apologetic ex-member of the pro-Soviet Communist party) had just quoted Antonio Gramsci in an interview (and only I, of those in the studio, had realised this) seemed to me to be a good example of how it takes an ex-Bolshevik to grasp what’s going on. Things have surely changed a bit, if Britain can have an ex-Communist, Gramsci-quoting Defence Secretary.

If The Left don’t like the anti-sovereignty, liberal intervention policy of the Blair and Cameron governments, then they haven’t understood the founding principles of their own movement. Or perhaps they just don’t like the look of the ‘abolition of national borders’ when they see it being done. Actually this has often been the problem for sensitive leftists.

They will the end of a socialist, secularist, internationalised, egalitarian society – but they dislike the means necessary to bring about this Hell-on-Earth, when they find out in too much detail what they are. The charming Nikolai Bukharin was quite happy for all kinds of repression to be used against non-Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution. But he was surprised and shocked when the same thing was done to him by Stalin a few years later, in the same cause.

I can, by the way, think of few British governments of modern times which have fulfilled their manifesto commitments more fully than did the Attlee Cabinet of 1945-51. For better or worse (and often for worse) they did what they said they would do, and did it so thoroughly that Churchill himself didn’t dare reverse it in 1951. Similarly, the 1964-70 Wilson government conducted a moral and social revolution of vast dimensions. And the Blair-Brown government likewise hugely expanded taxation and the public sector, shrivelled our national independence, adopted liberal interventionism on a large scale and blanketed the country in political correctness. If, after these three eras of profound change, a leftist person thinks himself betrayed or ignored, then I can only imagine he doesn’t understand politics, economics or diplomacy has no interest in culture or morals, or is simply half asleep. But as we see here, there are such people.

One of the many things to be said for my brother Christopher is that at least he is prepared to look the consequences of his beliefs in the face, and acknowledge them as essential to what he desires.

And so he thinks (though he still hesitates over several points).

The problem with most Leftists is that they are in the grip of a dogmatic faith, and therefore cannot think. And so they must twist reality to suit the dogma, for they would be bereft if they had to accept that their dogma is wrong. That is why they all believe this self-serving fantasy that they are poor, sad excluded minority figures, when in fact their ideas dominate the country.

Mr Gibson says ; ‘I went to a comprehensive. I achieved straight A grades at A level, went to get a 1st class honours degree, Master's with distinction and a PhD. Stop generalising!’

Two points. In a devalued education system these grades and qualifications do not necessarily mean what they would have meant in a system that was not dependent on comprehensive state secondary schools, and hadn’t needed to lower its standards to conceal the decline in quality, as we have done (see John Marks, ‘The Betrayed Generation’).

Indeed, were Mr Gibson a regular reader here he might know ( see *index*!) that the devaluation of all examinations, all grades , including A levels and University degrees is often discussed. Thus his experience proves nothing. Second, while I have no doubt that comprehensives destroy the educational hopes of many who go to them, some people have such natural gifts, and such strong backing from home, (and attend one of the comprehensives that is less bad, less disorderly and less hostile to learning than the majority) and can therefore obtain a reasonable education in spite of being forced to attend a bad school. It is Mr Gibson who is generalising.

If Mr Wooderson can direct me to research showing that secondary moderns were worse for social mobility than comprehensives, I will examine it and comment on it. I have not heard of it. In fact I am often struck by how little is written about these schools ( some of which, by 1985, were offering A level courses and getting pupils into University) . But I would point out that secondary moderns were not *designed* to achieve social mobility. That was the job of the grammar schools. It would seem to me that you would have to take both sorts of schools together, and compare their joint results with those of comprehensives.

On the question of private tutors, etc, I have no doubt that some parents will always use private tutors. The financial incentive for a parent in a grammar school area is huge. Mr Anthony Blair, for instance, did so, even though his sons were at one of the best state schools in the country. I believe many other socialist politicians do the same, rather than admit that comprehensives are inferior to selective schools. This is only one of many hypocritical actions they undertake, to conceal this truth from themselves and others (a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The House I Grew Up In ‘, featuring Toby Young’s recollections of his education, under the influence of his egalitarian anti-grammar school father Michael, provides an example of this which is both poignant and infuriating).

But if in every area of the country there were grammar places available to between 30 and 40 per cent of children, obtained not by a single exam but by (as I advocate, see *index* !) the German system of mutual agreement between parents and teachers, with second chances at 13 and even 15, I doubt if it would happen very much. I don’t think it does in Germany. Perhaps any Northern Irish readers might wish to comment on whether such tutoring is common there. I have no idea. But my guess is that, while it happens, it is not remotely comparable to what goes on in Kent and Buckinghamshire.

Tutoring was not unknown in the days of the eleven-plus, and it will not die out entirely if we reinstate a national grammar school system covering the whole of England and Wales. But the current situation where heavily oversubscribed grammar schools, within commuting distance of the capital, are overwhelmed by demand, is a result of the *abolition* of selection in neighbouring areas, not of its existence where it survives. It gives no indication of the operation of a national selective system. This too has been discussed many times before (see *index* !).

We now have to be pleased that a man has not been sacked from his job for putting a small cross on the dashboard of his company van. Please forgive me if my joy is muted this Eastertide. The real meaning of the Wakefield Palm Cross Affair is not specially happy.

Colin Atkinson would have been fired if it hadn’t been for the might of this newspaper – and the dogged courage of a union official, Terry Cunliffe. Many unions are keen on ‘Equality and Diversity’ codes, and wouldn’t have taken the case.

And as it’s Easter, I’d like to focus on the fact that the manager involved, Denis Doody, had a picture (perhaps I should say ‘icon’) of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara on his office wall.

Interesting. Why? Well, what we recall at Easter is the show trial and judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth. A mob is manipulated into calling for his death.

The judge, who knows he is innocent, feebly gives in. Such things are common in the real world, to this day.

The resurrection, which some of us still celebrate today, symbolises the ultimate defeat of cruel and cynical human power by a far greater force. Among other things, Easter enshrines the idea that what we do here matters somewhere else, that there is an absolute standard by which our actions are judged.

Down 20 centuries, this idea has restrained the powerful. They do not like it. Never have. Never will.

The worship of Christ, victim of a lynch mob and a crooked judge, is dangerously radical.

What about the cult of Comrade Guevara, embraced by Mr Doody? It claims to be radical too. But its devotees are the power-worshipping generation that now dominates our culture, using their slogan of ‘equality’ as a bludgeon to flatten opposition.

Guevara was an evil killer, the exact opposite of Jesus. There is no excuse at all for revering him. He personally slaughtered alleged traitors to his nasty revolution.

One of these was Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide. Guevara himself icily recounted: ‘I fired a .32 calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died.’

Later, when the rock-star rebel ‘Che’ was in power, he would lie on top of the wall at La Cabana prison, jauntily smoking a cigar while he watched the firing squads below punching bloody holes in the victims of his kangaroo trials.

Guevara’s view of justice was typical of the smug Left, which knows it is right because it knows it is good. ‘Don’t drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don’t use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary.’

There you have it, rather neatly expressed – the two rival forces that compete for supremacy in what was once a Christian country – the Gospel of Che, hot with hate and splattered with other people’s blood and brains in the pursuit of a utopia that never comes, and the Gospel of Christ, a life laid down willingly for others.

Care to choose?

Did Cameron vote for Labour in 1997?

David Cameron said on Friday that it was a good thing Labour won the 1997 General Election, something that a remotely awake media would have blazoned across the sky in vast headlines, but which they buried instead.

His words, spoken in Bedford, were: ‘I think we know in 1997 the country needed change.’

Do we know that? Did it ‘need’ the ‘change’ it got – 13 years of political correctness, stupid wars, tax and spending? I hardly think so.

Generally, the Prime Minister pretends at voting time that he didn’t like the Blair-Brown junta. But if it turned out that he’d voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

Mr Cameron, in full election mode, is now banging on (as he would call it if anyone else did it) about drunkards and illegal drug abusers claiming benefits for being drunk and drugged. He doesn’t mean it. He regards types like me, who think that you can stop drinking too much if you want to, and that people take heroin because they like it, as horrible reactionary brutes.

But unless you accept that people are fully responsible for their own actions – and modish liberals like Mr Cameron spend half their lives denying this – then the logic leads - inexorably to paying them ‘incapacity benefit’.

Likewise his opportunist moaning about judges making privacy law. They do this because Parliament (under his beloved Blair) gave them the power to do it. He knows perfectly well that this is the case.

How can I begin to tell you how much this man and his party do not deserve your support? And how much they laugh at you when you give it to them?

Lewis and a drugs cover-up

The issue of psychobabble versus common sense – linked to the dangers of antidepressant drugs – is increasingly important.

If you think that people are unhappy because bad things have happened to them, and that giving them mood-altering pills is wrong, you find yourself viewed as a heartless monster.

In last week’s episode of the occasionally enjoyable TV police series Lewis, the detective, played as an increasingly ill-tempered and crusty figure by Kevin Whately, started out being hostile to a tricky pill-dispensing doctor. So did his funky underling, James Hathaway, played by Laurence Fox.

But the real message was different. Their boss told the younger man: ‘You’re supposed to be bringing Lewis out of the Stone Age, not joining him there.’

And lo, by the end, the seemingly nasty psychiatrist was revealed to be a saintly and honest character.

I find these days that even asking questions about the huge prescription of antidepressants in modern Britain gets me into trouble. Actually, that’s why I keep doing it. The twitchiness of the pill-popping faction suggests they are hiding their own grave doubts.

Mr Parris civilised? I’ve got news for you

Some of you may have enjoyed my cameo appearance on Have I Got News For You, in which I was filmed sneering lengthily at the presentation of an award to the slippery ex-MP Matthew Parris.

What got my goat was the description of Mr Parris as ‘civilised’, after he had gravely misrepresented my views on a public platform and refused to make amends for this cheap behaviour. As civilised as a rattlesnake, I’d say.

********************************As the Libya policy goes wrong, the nation’s brakes have failed. Where is the high-level criticism? Where the questioning? The Prime Minister was interviewed at length on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and even managed to give some (duff) racing tips but, incredibly, was not asked about Libya.

Parliament has not been recalled – did you know that only the Government can do this? The main effect of our intervention has been to prolong a civil war, and the futile carnage in Misrata is largely our fault. Having intervened supposedly to prevent a massacre in Benghazi, we may be causing one in Misrata.

The only truly humanitarian course now available is to provide an evacuation fleet to get non-combatants out of that city as soon as possible.

26 February 2008 6:23 PM

I was struck last week by the treacly response given to the retirement of the grisly old monster, Fidel Castro. In so many leftist media, from the BBC to the Guardian, we were offered the usual muck about Cuba's supposedly excellent schools and health care, by people who referred to the pensioner tyrant by his Christian name, 'Fidel', as if he were a personal friend rather than one of the remotest and most inaccessible dictators in the world.

They also pretended that Cuba's 'National Assembly' was a real Parliament rather than what it is, an appointed chamber of toadies and puppets, and - though they claim to be outraged by the powerless British monarchy being handed on from father to son - they were un-outraged by the handing over of real supreme authority from brother to brother. Vertical inheritance is all wrong. Horizontal's cool. Republicans, they're so ridiculous, can you beat them?

What would these people think of someone who referred to General Pinochet as 'Augusto', or if he had handed over power to his sibling? And why - I'll come to this at length later - is Castro allowed to maintain the death penalty, and to keep his popularity with the Left , whereas if I say I'm in favour of it, I'm a pariah from one end of Islington to the other?

By the way, I think all these pro-Castro ( sorry 'Fidel') people should be compelled, if they fall ill, to go to Cuba and - without access to hard currency - be left to endure the Cuban health service they so idiotically praise, under the same conditions suffered by the Cuban people. I think we would then hear a lot less about Castro's marvellous health service. The main 'evidence' for this claim comes of course from the Cuban state, famous for its severe prevention of independent journalism or any other critical examination of its activities.

As for the schools, they may well be better than ours at teaching children to read (not difficult) but some, notably the Lenin High School in Havana, are a good deal less equal than others. Like its British equivalents, the London Oratory, William Ellis and the Camden High School for Girls, the Lenin High School provides the children of a leftist elite with a far better education than they might get elsewhere. Everyone in Havana knows this. Why doesn't the Guardian know it? Or the BBC?

Anyway, the problem with being educated in Cuba is that, once you've been educated, there's nothing to read except the works of K. Marx and V.Lenin, or of course the collected speeches of F.Castro and E.Guevara. - and the world's worst and most absurdly-titled newspaper 'Granma'. (I'll explain later how this journal gets its ludicrous name).

But back to the death penalty. The countries which wield this most keenly these days are all left-wing states. The People's Republic of China, of course, tops the world execution league. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is also quite a keen execution state - supposedly 'corrupt' businessmen have been shot in public, with lemons stuffed in their mouths to stop them screaming.

And then there's Cuba. The jolly, liberal fun revolution of 1959, with all those glamorously-bearded young men in fatigues in charge, began with howling show trials (the few not-guilty verdicts reversed on a whim by the leader himself) and much spraying of bullets, screaming and splattering of blood, a lot of it ordered by the picturesque Ernesto Guevara. The bullet-pocks from the firing squads can still be inspected (I have done so) in the moat of the La Cabana fortress, now a tourist site but until recently a squalid prison. Total figures for those judicially murdered by the Castro terror are not available, but the distinguished Historian Hugh Thomas has put the figure (perhaps modestly) at 5,000.

More recent executions have been colder, more secret and even more sinister. The 1989 shooting of General Arnaldo Ochoa, after a largely secret trial, ostensibly for alleged drug trafficking, is generally thought in Cuba to have been the despotic snuffing out of a dangerous rival who might have defected. Ochoa, a former ' hero of the revolution, technically faced a maximum of 20 years in prison for his crime. But in lawless Cuba, where 'Fidel' was all-powerful, Ochoa went to the firing squad anyway. It was typical of Cuba that a political case should have been dressed up as a criminal one, so that Castro could continue to pretend that he has no political prisoners. Opponents of the regime are almost invariably persecuted for imagined or fanciful violations of the criminal code.

So why do the Left swallow this camel, praising and sucking up to and romanticising this sordid despotism, and ignoring its habit of killing opponents, but strain at the gnat of hanging a few heinous murderers here in Britain?

It's all from the same root - the Left's worship of the supposedly all-benevolent state which they control, or hope to control. Get in the way of that, and you can be liquidated. It is the supreme law, and you will be an expendable casualty in a wider war. In fact, most socialists once they have supreme power, happily reintroduce the death penalties they campaigned against when they were powerless.

When I pointed out in my 'Brief History of Crime' that the 1930s English barrister D.N.Pritt, a prominent campaigner against the death penalty was a leading apologist for Stalin's show trials ( which always ended in death for the accused), I drew upon myself the livid rage of leftist critics. How dare I suggest an inconsistency in the Left on the basis of this horrible man? Yet when it comes to the Stalins of today, the Pritts of today still suffer from the same doublethink. You can work out who I'm getting at.

And now, for those of you faced with arguments at work or in the pub about the death penalty, I shall now provide a Question and Answer guide to the case for hanging.

Q. Well, I would be in favour of the death penalty, but I am worried about innocent people being hanged. Doesn't that fear make it impossible to have a death penalty?

A. No. It is a perfectly good argument for taking a huge amount of trouble to ensure that innocents are not executed. It is also a good argument for bringing back some sort of property or education qualification for juries, and abolishing majority verdicts. Nobody should be hanged except on a unanimous verdict of mature and educated people. But the world isn't perfect, and we don't let this concern for the innocent stand in the way of lots of other policies, many of them supported by the very people who raise this objection to execution.

For instance, every three years, two people are killed by convicted murderers released early from prison. These victims are innocent. In that case, the liberals who advance this argument would have to accept that every convicted murderer should be locked up for life without the chance of parole so as to avoid the risk to the innocent. But they don't believe this. So where's their concern for innocent death now? Then again, most people supported the Kosovo war and still do (especially liberals). But when we bombed Serbia, we knew that innocents were bound to die, and they duly did die - including the make-up lady at the Belgrade TV station. That didn't stop these liberal leftists, who oppose hanging guilty murderers, from supporting it, and continuing to support it after those deaths had taken place.

Not a liberal leftist? Then there's our mad transport policy which just happens to suit quite a lot of us down to the ground, of relying so heavily on motor cars that we require an incredibly feeble driving test and allow tens of thousands of unskilled people to drive cars at a far too young age. We know from experience that this will result, every year , in at least 3,000 deaths. Yet we do nothing.

Our failure to act, in the knowledge that this failure will lead to those deaths, is deliberate, conscious self-interested negligence, morally equivalent to deliberate proxy killing for personal advantage (as offered by Harry Lime to Holly Martins in the Big Wheel in 'The Third Man'). It is also the reason why the courts don't adequately punish those who kill while driving. We're all conscious that driving isn't really safe, that we impose far too much responsibility on drivers in a fundamentally dangerous system, and that it could so easily have been us who did the killing. Personally I think this intolerable carnage is a much more urgent problem in our society than the faint hypothetical risk of hanging someone for a murder he didn't commit. So is the growing level both of homicide itself, and of violence that would be homicidal were it not for our superb emergency surgeons, who nightly drag back dozens from the lip of the grave.

People dislike being told this because it is absolutely true and very harrowing. These deaths are all of innocent people. If the fear of killing an innocent person really was an overwhelming veto on a public policy, then the driving test would have to made so difficult that most of us could never pass it, speed limits would have to be lower than they are now, and private car ownership restricted to a tiny few highly-skilled persons.

The truth is that the fear of killing innocents is not a reason to abolish or ban capital punishment. If it were, we'd have to abolish the armed services and be forced to ride bicycles. It's an excuse for people not to face up to their responsibilities.

Q. How can you express moral disapproval of killing, by killing someone else?

A. It is not killing we are trying to express loathing for. It is murder. All of us, except absolute pacifists, accept that killing is sometimes justified. In simple self-defence, the case is easy. In defensive war, in which aggressive actions are permitted, less straightforward but still acceptable to most of us. And I think quite a few of us would be ready to forgive and condone in advance an assassination of an aggressive tyrant before he could embark on war. So we license armed forces to shoot back at our attackers, or to attack our attackers in retaliation or deterrence.

What we are disapproving of is murder ( the Commandment is not, as so often said 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' but 'Thou Shalt do no Murder'). This remember, is the deliberate, premeditated, merciless (and often prolonged and physically cruel in the extreme)killing of an innocent person, generally for the personal gain of the murderer. There is no comparison between such an action and the lawful, swift execution of a guilty person, after a fair trial with presumption of innocence, the possibility of appeal and of reprieve.

Absolute pacifists are at least consistent, but if they had their way we'd be in a German empire where innocent people were being executed all the time with gas-chambers, guillotines and piano-wire, and worse. So their consistency doesn't offer much of a way out.

Q. But deterrence doesn't work. Most states in the USA have the death penalty and the murder rate is often higher there than in states that don't have it.

A. First of all, this is not the USA, a country with far higher levels of violence(until recently anyway) than we have had for centuries. Comparisons between the two countries need to be made with great care. Secondly, no US state really has the death penalty. Even Texas, which comes closest, still fails to execute the majority of its convicted murderers, who fester for decades on death row while conscience-stricken liberals drag out their appeals to the crack of doom.Most states which formally have the penalty on their books seldom or never apply it.

The 1949 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (which was inconclusive on deterrence and most other things) pointed out that deterrence was very hard to establish. Countries which abolish the death penalty usually do so after a long period of suspension, or when it is hardly used, or when the law is unclear. So the murder rates before and after the formal date of abolition often tell us very little. In Britain, this is also the case. The death penalty had its teeth drawn in 1957 and the annual number of executions in the final years of capital punishment was small. So the penalty's official date of abolition, 1965, is misleading. There's another feature of this I'll turn to later.

Then there is the difficulty of classifying murder. The 1957 Act introduced a category of 'manslaughter due to diminished responsibility' which got you off the death penalty. And so, for the eight years after 1957, this category of homicide grew quite sharply. Some suspect that these are cases which would have been murders before 1957. If that is so, as we shall see, then it makes quite a lot of difference. Since then, it has not been so important, since the difference between a manslaughter sentence and the so-called 'life' sentences given for murder is no longer as stark as the old distinction between a prison sentence or an appointment with Mr Albert Pierrepoint on the scaffold.

Nowadays, it is suspected (especially by the relatives of victims who write to me about this complaining) that quite a lot of cases which would once have been prosecuted as murder are now prosecuted as manslaughter so as to get a quicker, easier conviction.

So the homicide statistics offer a rather wobbly idea of what is going on. Skip this if you want, but it is important. The blurred categories might suggest one thing, while actually saying another. Even so, here are some samples.In 1956, when the death penalty was still pretty serious, there were 94 convictions for homicide in England and Wales (all future figures refer to England and Wales unless otherwise stated). Of these, 11 were for infanticide, 51 for manslaughter and 32 for murder. In 1958, after the softening of the law, there were 113 homicide convictions - 10 infanticides, 48 manslaughters, 25 for manslaughter with 'diminished responsibility' and 30 for murder. By 1964 there were 170 homicide convictions - 12 infanticides, 73 manslaughters, 41 manslaughters due to 'diminished responsibility' , 44 murders. So, in eight years, a rise in homicide from 94 to 170, quite substantial. But those convicted for murder had risen only from 32 to 44, which hardly seems significant at all. What was really going on here could only be established by getting out the trial records. But it is at least possible that, by reclassifying and downgrading certain homicides, the authorities had made things look a good deal better than they were. Remember, these are convictions, not totals of offences committed.

Sorry, more statistics here. In 1966, immediately after formal abolition, there were 254 homicide convictions, 72 of them for murder. In 1975, 377 homicide convictions, 107 for murder. In 1985, 441 manslaughter convictions, 173 for murder. In 2004, there were 648 homicide convictions - including 361 murders, 265 ordinary manslaughters and 22 'diminished responsibilities'. Interestingly, more people were convicted of manslaughter (265) than were charged with it (137) and none of those convicted of 'diminished responsibility' (22) were charged with it . Many murder prosecutions failed (759 were proceeded against).

The increasingly important charge of 'attempted murder' has also run into trouble. In 2004 417 were proceeded against, and 96 convicted. Prosecutions for wounding or other acts endangering life was even more troublesome, with 7,054 proceeded against and 1,897 convicted. These figures, again,. are for charges and convictions rather than instances of the offence, which in both cases is considerably higher. Offences of wounding etc are now close to the 19,000 mark each year, around triple the total for 30 years ago.

And many of these cases would have been murders, if we still had the medical techniques of 1965. Again, this makes direct 'before ' and 'after' comparisons, required for a conclusive case for or against deterrence. hard. And we must also remember the general moral decline that has accompanied the weakening of the law, and may have been encouraged by it. If you remove the keystone of an arch, many other stones, often quite far away in the structure, will loosen or fall.

Finally, a little historical curiosity which I personally find fascinating. Some American researchers suggest that the sort of murder which has increased since the death penalty in the USA was effectively abolished is so-called 'stranger' murder, for example, the killing of a woman by her rapist , or of a petrol station attendant by the man who has robbed him. The calculation ( and criminals do calculate) is simple. "If I leave this person alive, she or he can testify against me, and I could go to jail for a very long time. If I kill him or her, then there will be no witness and I will probably get away with it entirely. And even if I am convicted of murder, all that will happen is jail time." Bang.

So, the death penalty may actually prevent or deter violent crimes which might otherwise end in an opportunist killing. It is said that British bank-robbers, before 1957, would search each other for weapons in case one of them killed, and they all swung - which was then the rule.And Colin Greenwood, a former police officer and expert on Gun Crime, produces the following interesting , in fact gripping fact. In both 1948 and 1956, the death penalty was suspended in this country while Parliament debated its future. During both periods of suspension, armed and violent offences rose sharply. After the 1948 attempt to abolish hanging failed ( Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin being among the Labour MPs who voted to keep it), they fell sharply. After 1956, when the law was weakened, they fell back again, but not so sharply. In 1964, they rose again, and have been doing so ever since.

I think this, taken together, is strong evidence for a deterrent effect. I am not talking about total deterrence - some crimes could never be deterred - but partial and significant, potentially lifesaving. How many innocents have died, or been horribly maimed, because those who accept the salaries and perks of office are not prepared to assume its hard duties, and wield the civil sword?And yet opponents of the death penalty whimper on about the minuscule danger of hanging the wrong person.

Q. Surely revenge has no part in a civilised society? A.How true, and how right. One of the purposes of stern penalties is to prevent revenge by making it clear that the law has real teeth. But a toothless law will lead to the return of revenge among us. The bargain we strike with our rulers is that we give up the right to personal vengeance, and the endless blood-feuds that follow it. And in return, we ask our rulers to wield a stern law, dealing with wrongdoing in such a way as to drive home the moral lesson that no evil deed goes unpunished. It's a simple contract. Civilised, law-governed societies rest on it, but our political class prefer not to fulfil it because they haven't the moral guts to take responsibility for sending a murderer to his death. It is this gutlessness among politicians, more than anything else, that has led to the abolition of the death penalty. They won't take the responsibility. This cannot be said often enough. The result is that responsibility is increasingly handed over to an unofficially armed police force, which shoots people without trial, appeal or the possibility of reprieve, and often gets it wrong. Watch the numbers grow.

But that's only the beginning. If ( as I fear) respect for the criminal justice system continues to dwindle especially among the abandoned honest poor, we can expect to see an increase of vigilante private 'justice', even lynch-mobs. What the left-liberals don't seem to grasp is that if they strangle justice, revenge is what they will get. And then, rather too late, they will be able to tell the difference between the two. I wish there was some other way to explain it to them.

*Oh, yes, and the reason why the Cuban Communist paper is called 'Granma' is that this was the name of the boat in which Castro and his friends arrived in Cuba for their second attempt to overthrow Batista. It is a smallish motorcruiser, whose original owner had named it in hour of his grandmother. I don't think Castro or his comrades ever realised that was what the name meant.

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13 December 2006 10:16 AM

I don't defend Augusto Pinochet, the late dictator of Chile. He was a wicked man who tortured and murdered his opponents and - in a law-governed, constitutional democracy - chose illegal and undemocratic methods. Whatever good he may have done, which is in any case open to serious question, does not excuse these unforgiveable actions. So why won't the Left say the same simple thing about Pinochet's socialist twin, the Cuban torturer and mass murderer Fidel Castro?

As I bicycled past Hyde Park Corner the other day, I was upbraided by another cyclist who said I was unfair about Cuba and - when I called him a sucker for the regime - absurdly accused me of being a toady of the British 'regime'. (So far as I could work out before the lights changed, this was because, despite being as rude as I can be about our major political parties, critical of the Queen and Prince Charles, I support the institution of monarchy. I really didn't have the whole afternoon to spare to put him right about this).

He really couldn't grasp the simple point that, whatever he might believe about Castro's alleged (and dubious) achievements in health and education - the evidence for which comes mainly from Cuban official statistics which cannot be independently checked - Castro is a monster.

He has reversed the verdicts of courts when he didn't like them, so as to punish opponents. He imprisoned his old comrade Huber Matos, who just wanted to go home quietly. His regime began with show trials and mass shootings and continued with repression and censorship and intolerance, which have gone on ever since. For a long period he persecuted homosexuals. He has arranged to be succeeded by his brother, which the left normally would denounce as a sort of sideways hereditary monarchy. His prisons are a disgrace. Torture is used. Interestingly, Pinochet on occasion put in a good word for Castro, and Castro was - reasonably - perturbed when Pinochet was arrested, seeing this as a danger to himself.

The honest thing, whatever your politics, is to condemn them both. I do. What about you?

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